This Is Not the End Read online

This Is Not the End

  Ten Short Pieces

  by

  Shelby Davis

  (CC) BY-NC-SA-3.0, 2009, by Shelby Davis

  lists

  all ye know on earth

  death and mumbling

  immanence

  insect

  ron

  the appreciative life

  harold

  preservation

  the thing with feathers

  Lists

  My mother’s shopping lists were ordered by rules known only to her. As you slid your finger down the columns of groceries and toiletries, you would invariably be stopped by something along the lines of “2dozjumHerbal Essences” or “1pepperoni TC,” with the “TC” underlined twice and flanked by gnarled masses of pencil scratch-outs. When we were kids, we dreaded accompanying her to Wal-Mart, or worse, the Cosco at the edge of town, where the echoing rafters and limitless aisles seemed to mock the confusion into which we were inevitably thrown when handed torn-off fragments of the list. Of course, it was easy enough to see in hindsight that “2dozjumHerbal Essences” was merely the bastard child of two drunkenly weaving columns--we had been supposed to get two dozen jumbo eggs and a bottle of my mother’s favourite brand of shampoo (ever inventive in creating proprietary abbreviations--“TC” standing for, what else, thin crust pizza--my mother scrupulously wrote out brand names in full).

  It was a little like ordering chemicals for a laboratory, sans any knowledge of chemistry--or, for that matter, laboratories, although my ignorance of the distinction between baking soda and baking powder cannot be entirely the root of my confusion. Eventually I--and my siblings--learned the difference between tomato paste and tomato sauce, and could readily distinguish one brand of laundry detergent from a similarly-styled knock-off, but my shame-faced trips back to the mothercart never ceased. I would track her down, most often in the produce section--she was usually loath to trust us with the delicate task of selecting the very best fruits and vegetables--and hand her back my portion of the list, asking for an explanation. Usually it amounted to a failure of awareness on my part--get the kind of soap we always get, of course! If I pointed out that we were in the habit of buying several different brands at different times, I would be informed that it had been weeks since we had bought Brand X, and we only got Brand Y when my father took the children shopping, and the slowly-diminishing pile of Brand Z had been entirely due to a single purchase, a regrettable experiment unfortunately conducted with a bulk package. This cycle of pattern-recognition failure continued even after I left for college--when I came home, every few weeks, and in later years, on breaks, it was a remarkable point of contention that I didn’t know what cereal my siblings ate for breakfast every morning. When I pointed out that we had never bought Chocolate Sugar Warheads when I was in the house, I was immediately reassured that I had indeed had them bought for me.

  “Besides,” she added, “it was your father that got that box last week.”

  Perhaps we dreaded these shopping trips so much because the magnitude of a mistake could be enormous. Ever thrifty, my parents bought in bulk--the idea of buying a single toothbrush was anathema to them, as was the thought that one could purchase toilet paper in anything less than a full pallet. We regarded the label “Family Size” the way professional chefs regard upscale kitchen appliances, as something that might hold some promise of fulfillment for the masses but were pale imitations of the real stuff. Because of this, a mistake at the store could disrupt family life for a month, consigning us all to an inferior brand of butter for however long it took to consume eight pounds of it. If that wasn’t bad enough, my parents hated to shop as much as we hated to accompany them--with the consequence that, despite having six mouths to feed, trips were infrequent--and thus protracted--debacles.

  When I married, it was at my parents’ church. I stayed with them beforehand. I debated getting a hotel room, but my parent’s wouldn’t hear of it--who stays in a hotel when they have family? I also suspected they didn’t like the idea of Kelly and I sequestered in a hotel together--better to keep an eye on this strange newcomer and invite her to stay, too. The first time we went shopping, it was just my mother and I, but the second time, Kelly accompanied us, reaching for her own cart when we arrived and taking, just as I did, a portion of my mother’s list. I worried that she would see a side of my mother that she wouldn’t like, but if she did, she didn’t say anything. My mother, also, was gracious, and when Kelly pulled her own cart alongside my mom, laden with 2 rather than 1% milk, mom kept her mouth shut. The next day, however, I noticed that my father made a run to the convenience store right after breakfast, returning with two gallons of 1% milk. The gallons of 2% languished in the fridge, and as far as I know, were still there when Kelly and I pulled away from the church and started the drive to South Carolina.

  It wasn’t so much the anal-retention practiced my mother with such precision, but the arcane and private language that made shopping a nightmare. All too often, a list intended for her private perusal--she did not infrequently go shopping alone--was handed off to someone else, and symbols denoting quantity and flavour became riddles, cryptograms whose meaning could not be inferred from a document so inconsistently written--a bottle of olive oil may be designated extra virgin, but if no qualifier is given the next time, does the absence indicate a reversal, or has the one-time injunction become the new norm?

  Scientists in search of meaning have claimed that the chaotic portions of the universe are merely acting out rules too complex for us to follow--that while God may not play with dice, the game is sufficiently complicated that one iteration of the pattern occupies the entire lifespan of the universe. I’d like to think that my mother’s shopping lists are merely symbolic reflections of that pattern, each fitting into the rational incomprehensibility of the world. Especially now, as she lies in the hospital bed, her mind a buzzing mass of synapses and half-formed thoughts, I miss the scrawled litanies, the hybrids of computer-printouts and penciled-in post-hoc corrections. Especially now, I have to trust that the incomprehensible sibilants and moans are symbols, something that has meaning for her, something that ultimately means exactly what she means to say, and that brings me, head hung low, closer to her side, in order to understand.

  All Ye Know on Earth

  I was driving on Highway 35 on my way home from work. Up in front of me was a giant billboard advertising yet another jeweler, in ten-foot letters and bright silver watches like massive alien machines. The traffic slowed and stopped on the ramp as it bottlenecked further into the city, and my head turned to examine the sign and the blocked view of the cityscape and land beyond. Past it was another billboard, with the name of a casino as its only text, filled with collaged images of money, plush rooms, and dancers. A quarter mile further brought me to an advertisement for business management solutions. Another few hundred yards and I was urged to try the new sandwich at the new sandwich place. The sun set and the signs stayed bright as automatic light switched on.

  The city grew dark and the hills beyond feebled out, existing only in our minds and finally not even there. All that remained were the well-lit and shiny reminders that lawyers were standing by to take my case to court, and that somebody’s air conditioners would outlast somebody else’s.

  I had an idea.

  I made the call the next day. It would put me back a good half grand, but it would be worth it. There would be no design meeting; I sent them the image and it was printed. A few weeks later it went up.

  Now on my commute, when I paused in the crush of metal bodies, I looked up and saw mountains by Maxfield Parrish, reaching up to the clouds in impossible cragginess, rivulets and gushing streams painted down their sides
, with the sun striking vibrant oranges and reds into the shadows of the rocks. There were trees in copper-patina green and still pools quieter than the middle of winter but warm as the first day of summer.

  No doubt people thought it was the first part of a two-stage advertising gimmick, or a filler to be used when no one was renting space on the sign. But I was happy.

  The other signs were next. One by one, I placed the calls and sent the pictures to offices and printing shops. Van Gogh’s epic wheat field, with the brooding sky and blazing earth, was pasted over the turnpike, and commuters looked up in astonishment at the approaching crows, bigger than life and settling to rest before them. Several other signs received his fields of poppies, the lilacs at Auvers and the mulberry trees, the olive groves and irises. I didn’t stop there. Cezanne adorned the 5th street exit, with a breathtaking view of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the landscape spilling away beneath us in brash yellows and greens, in beautiful smears and daubs of colour. Homer covered the signs along the east end in huge washes of cliffs and trees standing alone against the cold, of rivers and autumnal foliage, and tropical palms ripe with fruit, and the placid blue of open ocean, and with jungles teeming with rampant life. A giant sky opened over the turnoff for Highway 675, fields and twisted oaks miniscule under titanic clouds and birds so far away they seemed to brush the limit of the sky, and van Ruisdael was before ten thousand people daily.

  I went further. I had to move out into the manufacturing district, the nightlife zone, the suburbs. Renoir’s peaceful meadow stilled the riot of the interstate. Manet’s own garden graced the air above a textile mill. Sisley bestowed the fields of Veneux-Nadon on a crack house and the on-ramp that over-arched it. The pretentious mcmansions, not so rich yet that they could escape an ad for toothpaste peeking over their back lawns, woke one morning to instead see a country lane by Gauguin warmed by soft sunlight. A daycare went about its business to the backdrop of Eragny in spring, courtesy Pissarro--and I was done.

  I was done. My money was gone, the checks were already bouncing, and I did not know what I would do next. But I was happy. The city was covered in colour, colour rampant and exploding, with valleys and waterfalls where none had been, with open sky and trees, and flowers--flowers everywhere. The people walked and drove to the accompaniment of all nature. The night the last billboard went up, I climbed the broadcasting tower, the skyscraper that stands in the middle of the city and commands a view of it all. I looked out, and saw the hills beyond. My billboards were pale dots, blotches of light here and there on the ground. Beyond lay the glittering nebula of humanity, in their homes and workplaces, streetlamps and headlamps and window panes and office space swirling before my eyes. I saw them for what they were. Their own efforts told me what was being lived. The lights in neighboring towers flicked on and off like so many stars twinkling, accompanied by the blinking red bulbs fastened along the length of the radio towers on the horizon. Under it all the ground undulated slowly, gaining momentum as the houses thinned, until there were no houses left and the earth rose up in a chain of hills, meeting the infinite sky.

  Death and Mumbling

  I thought I might get some good ideas if I went down to the hospital.

  I always have stayed away from hospitals. People died or were born. But now I thought I might get some idea if I went down to where it was all happening, the being born and the dying. Mostly the dying. It was the dying that interested me.

  I sat on a bench in a sort of waiting room. I wanted to call it a green room; it wasn’t a place where the patients would wait to be called by the doctor; it was a place where the relatives would wait while the patient was in their room. It had a coffee bar, and comfortable couches, with trendy, muted colors on the walls and floor. Everything was clean and modern without being cold, a homogenized balancing act designed to keep everyone calm during their stressful time. It was a green room; patients were “guests”; their families were “guests” as well. Here was where the families would sit and be feted while they waited to be called out to perform, to smile and encourage or to don faces of appropriate mournfulness. The old ones would put on smiles, the young ones would look sad.

  I think I went there because it seemed to me that it was the place richest in emotional impact. It reeked of spent emotions, and the emotions were made all the stronger, here in the green room, by the efforts at suppression--the muted walls and gourmet coffees and scones, the overstuffed loveseats and couches, as if those in grief should not be permitted to sit on benches or folding chairs. It absolutely reeked of hush and hidden feeling. It was worse than a church. It was worse than a highschool hallway. It was more universal, more basic, something even the children could comprehend.

  #

  It was a funeral procession of the sort one sees in the smaller towns. The police cars escorted the hearse and the black funeral-house cars, slowly, with lights silently flashing. There was also a retarded man of the sort one sees in the smaller towns. Unlike his metropolitan counterparts, he was not seen passing his time at bus stops, nor was he institutionalized. He did not work as a janitor, or cashier at a thrift-store, or a factory. He appeared to have no job. Everybody knew him because he spent his time walking up and down the town’s sidewalks, pushing a shopping cart. Unlike the carts pushed by the homeless, his did not appear to contain the sum of his worldly possessions, or at any rate not the possessions one would think conducive to a life on the streets and under bridges. There were no clothes or bedroll. There was a blanket, but the sort--light, and blue, about two feet to a side and delicately fringed--in which one would wrap an infant. There was no food, no tightly knotted plastic bags. There was a radio and some odds and ends--I remember a baby doll and a radio, in particular. The baby doll was naked, with a gigantic head of blonde hair, who would occasionally ride in the child seat of the cart. The radio played loud sports and oldies. It was because of the radio that the man was frequently startled; people would come up behind him on the sidewalk, and he would not hear them until the very last moment. As they passed he would jump and burst out a garbled exclamation about not seeing them. The garbled explanation was the same, word for word, stutter for stutter, each time.

  He was thought to live with his mother or and older sister. It would explain the lack of an apparent job, as well as the lack of apparent means in his cart with which to live alone.

  Sometimes he rode a bicycle. He was permitted to ride it in the annual Fourth of July and Memorial Day parades, just as he was permitted to wander, unsuspected and unmonitored, through downtown and quiet suburbia alike, where children playing on the lawn would politely ignore him. He was riding his bicycle now, easily keeping up with the respectfully slow pace of the funeral procession. He was actually ahead of the hearse, between it and the front police car. Whenever they reached a stoplight, he would stop as well, putting one foot to the ground, propping himself up, and when the light changed, the hearse would wait while he forced his whole body into pushing the pedal down, slowly overcoming his inertia.

  I followed. When we got to the cemetery, the retarded man had to get off his bike. The main entrance road was paved, but the parallel roads branching from it, turning the gravestones into members of neat grassy strips, was dirt. He pushed the bike over the rutted ground, slowing down the hearse and the cars that followed behind. The police car got a little ahead, until the driver realized what was happening. He idled in the dirt path until the bicycle caught up. The air was cold and the retarded man briefly disappeared in the cloud of exhaust and vapour that had formed at the rear of the police car.

  In a short while, they reached the plot, with the hole for the casket already dug. While the minister read the eulogy, I watched, standing in the back. I had come to know this family from long observation at the hospital. The dead man had been in his forties. I wondered if, after the body died, the tumor continued to live for a little while. Perhaps those cells were even now multiplying,
albeit slowly and more slowly, until they would grind to a halt along with the rest of him. Was the tumor really a separate thing, that it could do that, exulting in its victory, like the winner in combat jumping up and down on the corpse of his opponent?

  I hoped no one would notice me. It was a fairly large group, about thirty in all, and I was wearing black like the rest. The immediate family would probably recognize me if they did notice: we had exchanged words over the months of the deceased’s decline; I had invented a backstory about my own aunt’s convalescence to explain my perennial presence.

  The retarded man was also standing in the back, opposite me. He was about ten feet behind the tightly packed group of mourners. It had begun to rain, a terribly clichéd graveside drizzling rain, and the mourners were tightly packed under the funeral-home provided canopy. The retarded man stood in the rain, one arm wrapped around the other, which awkwardly pointed down. He constantly shifted on his feet, as if the sound of spattering rain had awakened his bladder in him and he was fighting its urgings. It was the same pose and motion I had seen him take outside the hospital. He sometimes came by when I was there, and I could observe him through the vast glass front of the building.

  The green room was made to be light and airy while still private, so it had been positioned in the lobby, to the side, but separated by zigzagging screens nine feet high, and a virtual ceiling had been suggested by lights that hung above the screens, a smattering of globes dropped from the real ceiling, high above. I could only see him if I stepped around the screens and stood in the narrow and bright space between them and the plate-glass window, in the avenue trod only by custodians and the more rambunctious children. The retarded man would pace back and forth outside, sometimes with his cart and sometimes not. If he did have it with him, he would stop periodically to arrange the items inside. Once or twice he stopped and looked at me. His pacings and circlings would become wider and wider, stretching into the parking lot, into the expectant mother slots, the hospital boardmembers slots, the grassy medians with picnic tables and cigarette cans, until he wandered off, to pursue an invisible track somewhere else in the town.